The Moon and the Sun
by Vonda N. McIntyre
Summary
Versailles in 1693. Marie Josephe de la Croix is lady in waiting to a duchess, a gifted amateur composer and mathematician, and entirely dependent on the brother who raised her. That brother, Yves, is a Jesuit and a natural philosopher, and he has just returned from an expedition with a specimen for the king: a live sea monster, held in a tank in the fountain court, and the corpse of its mate, which is to be dissected and then eaten, because Louis XIV believes their flesh confers immortality.
Marie Josephe is set to sketch the dissection and care for the survivor. She works out, before anyone else and against the certainty of every learned man present, that the creature is a person. It sings. The song is language. It has a name, Sherzad, and it is being kept in a cage in a garden.
Around this runs the court, minutely and convincingly rendered: the etiquette of who may sit, the king's ageing body, an atheist count who is the only honest man at Versailles, and Marie Josephe's own precarious position as a woman who is visibly cleverer than she is permitted to be.
McIntyre spent a long time on the seventeenth century detail and it shows in the clothes, the music, the medicine and the theology.
Yves is the tragedy of it. He is not cruel, he is a serious scientist doing what serious science looked like in 1693, and he cannot hear his sister telling him that the specimen on his table is speaking, because nothing in his training permits it.
Around four hundred pages, sumptuous in its detail, slow for the first hundred and genuinely moving by the end, with an ending that costs somebody a great deal.
Best for readers who want historical fiction with one impossible element handled entirely seriously, and a heroine whose weapon is that she pays attention.
Historical Context & Significance
The Moon and the Sun won the 1997 Nebula Award for Best Novel, beating George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, a result that is now the most quoted piece of trivia about either book.
Vonda N. McIntyre had won the Nebula and the Hugo twenty years earlier for Dreamsnake, founded the Clarion West writing workshop in Seattle, and wrote several of the best regarded Star Trek novels, including the novelisation of The Wrath of Khan.
The film rights sold before publication and then sat for two decades. A version was finally released in 2022 as The King's Daughter, with Pierce Brosnan as Louis XIV, having been shot in 2014 and shelved for eight years. McIntyre died in 2019.